🔗 Share this article

Initially, few suspected that Francisco Franco would become a authoritarian ruler able to enforcing a ruthless dictatorship over 40 years. He was a small-statured, squeaky-voiced military man with a shaky grasp of non-military matters and zero personal appeal. Yet he achieved just that, prior to succumbing to natural causes in a hospital in Madrid, half a century ago recently.

The Warning of Superficial Ordinariness

To this day, Franco acts as a warning that outward mediocrity is not an obstacle to the ruthlessly ambitious. Behind the dull facade lay a slippery, clever operator. His drive was underpinned by an unyielding determination, a casual disregard to violence and unbounded self-confidence.

His admirers and defenders – including some on the resurgent extreme right in Spain, the US and the UK – still claim Franco was never really a autocrat, but rather a beloved rescuer from Marxism. They are wrong, but autocrats do not emerge from thin air.

"A significant portion of any society consists of people who desire authoritarian rule," political thinker from France Jean-François Revel noted the year after Franco's demise: "to wield it personally or – far more puzzlingly – to yield to it." Franco believed the same: the true desire of people was to see and feel themselves governed.

The Reality of Violence and Oppression

Naturally, if Franco had been truly beloved, there would have been no necessity for his 1936 military insurrection against an democratically chosen progressive administration, or for the half a million dead of the ensuing Spanish civil war. Nor would he have shot 20,000 people afterwards.

Franco grabbed power in a Spain mired in post-imperial ennui – a powerful realm having vanished the century before. He aimed to restore Spain's greatness. He accused outsiders. They were either stealing Spain’s money, plotting against the country as part of a Marxist-Jewish-masonic plot, or poisoning Spanish minds with foreign ideas: democratic systems, leftist ideas, communism, and his bizarre bugbear, secret societies.

A Deliberately Slow and Violent War

His war was deliberately slow and violent behind the lines, accompanied by a bloody purging of dissenters in an attempt to "purify" this tainted Spain. His new Spain also had to be a place of allegedly "virile" men and obedient women, whose rights to their bodies, children, work and possessions were cut, postponed, or transferred to husbands and fathers.

After a vengeful victory, Franco confined the nation into a corset of self-reliance and discarded the key. Economic self-sufficiency was embraced. Foreign capital and goods were shunned. "We have everything we need," he said.

Famine and Pariah Status

But he was wrong. The immediate result was famine, with people dying on city streets in the early and mid-1940s. While traveling on a victory tour through the towns of southern regions, people pleaded at his car window. "Please, Mr. Franco, some bread," they said. Even German representatives in Spain, his supporters, protested that a impressive exterior hid the horrific reality. By supporting Hitler and Mussolini during the World War II, Franco made Spain a outcast nation, but he refused to step aside later. Spaniards sank further into misery.

Self-Complacency and Cold War Rehabilitation

His belief that he was both selected by God and always right meant he insisted on a permanent rule in charge. A British ambassador complained that he lived in a "heavy mist of self-complacency", blind to his own incompetence. Luck, and a absence of clear doctrine, came to Franco’s rescue. As the Cold War began, he burnished his opposition to communism and the US rehabilitated him.

As a result, a failing economic system was ultimately saved and forced to open up by the US and the International Monetary Fund. In the 1960s, Spain was swept into a regional economic growth that had begun earlier in Italy and Portugal. Abruptly, visitors were pouring on to Spanish beaches at coastal resorts or on the southern coast. Many Spaniards remained unemployed, but the remittances after moving abroad also provided relief.

State Terror and Historical Amnesia

Franco quietly dropped his most stupid ideas – from founding a new empire to producing artificial fuel with a "miraculous" formula – but never abandoned his primary goal of making Spaniards tame, compliant and disengaged. He invested massively in state terror from the 1936 coup forward, implemented a strict, propaganda-based media regulation, and made sure multiple cohorts were educated in a heavily conservative and historically amnesiac Francoist curriculum. Even into the seventies, independent political parties, free and fair elections and labor organizations remained banned.

Franco also infantilised Spaniards, considering them unable of governing themselves. The scariest part of his legacy was that so many believed him.

Reversion to Brutality and Ancient Methods

When that fear-driven consensus started collapsing during the final years of his regime, he defaulted back to violent domination. Trigger-happy police, torture, firing squads and even that ancient killing method, the strangulation device, returned. The latter saw a metal collar fastened around a condemned person’s neck and tightened until it snapped their spine or cut off their air supply; it was employed by a western European government on its population, in 1974.

Fear and the Transition to Democracy

Nevertheless, the historian Antonio Cazorla Sanchez, a highly skeptical Franco chronicler, remembers experiencing sorrow as a child, upon hearing the news that Franco had died: "The sadness of that 12-year-old boy was felt at the time by millions of Spaniards, who thought that the man who had just died had been the best possible solution for a country that was hard to rule," he wrote. "This was the narrative at school, in the press, on the TV … "

The main feeling in response to Franco's death was anxiety. After all, what occurs after the man at the centre of a decades-long dictatorship passes away? Power was initially passed to the young king Juan Carlos, who supervised a period of change that ended with a public vote on the democratic constitution that remains in effect. Spain remains a vibrant, disputatious democratic state.

Heroic Narratives and Twisted Legacies

Heroic narratives emerged to account for this. From the leftist perspective, it was the result of pressure from courageous demonstrators, youth and workers who clashed repeatedly with security forces. From the conservative view, it was a sign of establishment wisdom. For his supporters, in the most distorted interpretation of all, it constitutes a part of the autocrat's heritage.

And here rests a problem. In a Madrid printing store where I printed out versions of my latest publication on the dictator, El Generalisimo, the owner kept maintaining that his father stated he had prospered under Franco. His father remembered, of course, only the economic boom of the sixties.

The Peril of Unawareness

While promoting the Spanish edition of the book, I have also discovered that the issues outlined by María Ramírez about growing up surrounded by silence about the dictatorship are still with us. College attendees tell me that their high school teachers were still skirting around the topic just a year or two ago. As a parent of Spanish youth, that is a major concern.

Ignorance is dangerous. It is understandable that nearly 20% young people think his regime was beneficial for Spain. The only way to change that is to break the silence and educate the new generation what the Franco era was really about.